1. Field of the Invention
The presented invention relates to a data visualization technique, particularly, a method for visualizing a complicated metro map in a limited displaying area.
2. Description of the Related Art
The conventional technologies for visualizing traffic information in a limited displaying area (ex: mobile device) are normally based on text and tables, which are unable to present the space relationships of transportation networks. According to the theory of visual cognition, the comprehension of graphs is much more efficient than text to most people. Therefore, converting tangled numbers and text data into graphs usually provides more information to users.
There have been graph-based methods for visualizing complicated metro maps on a mobile device. However, the prior arts cannot dynamically show the transportation routes on demand but can only present static information because of the limited computational capability. In order to keep the integrity of a metro map, they present all the stations and the connected edges on the screen. However, a ticket or a mobile phone tends to be exquisite and has a small displaying area, which is hard to visualize the complicated information. The prior arts can only present partial metro maps at a time. Otherwise the station names and the graph topologies will be too small to be recognized.
Accordingly, the presented invention introduces a method to visualize a complicated metro map in a limited displaying area in order to overcome the abovementioned problems. The practical design and the detailed embodiments of the presented invention are described below.